Berlin from beneath: Under the streets and into the bunkers on a subterranean city tour

'Please undress completely and then shower.' The steel door had been bolted shut behind me. An icy pair of eyes stared at me through an inch-thick glass peephole.

Gateway to culture: Berlin is a city of major landmarks, but there is as much to see below ground as above

Overhead, tourists strolled along Kurfurstendamm. But underground I was preparing to survive nuclear war, if I'd be so kind as to take off my clothes.

The Cold War ended 22 years ago, Germany was transformed above ground and Berlin reinvented itself as a party town. But a dark, unchanging nether region lurks beneath the surface.

'This was the only place where West Berlin civilians might have survived a direct nuclear attack,' said historian Niko Rollmann, who led me out of the 'contaminated' chamber and into the 'clean' shelter.

'For me it's a haunting spot.'

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The low-ceilinged room brought to mind a vast underground garage lined with ranks of aluminium bunk beds bathed in eerie blue light. Inside it, 3,600 civilians were expected to survive Armageddon on tinned food and bottled water for up to a year. Empty body bags waited in the sickroom. Locked cupboards were stocked with valium.

As many architectural traces of fascism, communism and war have been erased above ground, in the subterranean world the structures have been locked up and forgotten.

'It's our lost knowledge,' said Niko. 'Every time I climb down a set of cellar steps, I feel as if I'm boarding a time machine.'

Niko's Secrets Of The Berlin Underworld tours take you to Nazi torture cells, 'ghost' tube stations and Cold War escape tunnels as well as places used by the anti-Nazi resistance and East German opposition movements. Once a quarter of East Berlin full of breweries, Prenzlauer Berg is now a trendy neighbourhood.

This little piggy: Hidden in a brewery vault, this mural is one of the many colourful scenes of underground Berlin

But beneath the converted 'cathedrals of beer' lies a place of the damned – an early underground Nazi concentration camp. 'Subterranean Berlin enthralls me because it's hidden, it's secretive and because it's related to death,' said Niko. 'My job is to help people remember their history.'

'You tell me which is a more effective means of doing that: by droning on about the Nazis in a bright lecture room or by going down to the dark places where they tortured their victims?'

Hitler built a network of bunkers to protect Berliners from Allied bombing. With the fall of the Wall, the group Berliner Unterwelten transformed one of them into a clubhouse and exhibition rooms at Gesundbrunnen U-Bahn station. It's full of rusted bunks and handcranked ventilators.

Meanwhile, near the demolished Anhalter Bahnhof station, the the dungeon-like Gruselkabinet echoes with recordings of screams and sirens. It has been accused of sensationalising 'bunker tourism'. But last year 150,000 visitors explored Berlin's underbelly.

No one can visit Hitler's bunker, which has been filled with sand and is under a car park. 'My interest is cultural memory,' said Niko. 'I want Berlin's traumatic history to have a memorial, so we know who we are and stop similar things from happening again.'